Eliza Livingston

Eliza Livingston

Title of collection: The Soul of Place

Eliza is a 23 year old student working on her Masters of Sustainable Peace building at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. She considers herself a transdisciplinary artist unbound by any medium. As a freelance photographer, Eliza has spent most of her time working on digital art but returned to more hands-on media for this series. While considering Identity + Perception, Eliza focused on the balance of inward and outward perspectives and chose to focus on moments in life where both occurred. The Soul of Place comes from John Paul Lederach’s book The Moral Imagination and as he states is “a kind of inner voice that speaks to each of us personally, calling out to understand the nature of the place where we find ourselves and the nature of our place in that location.” Being a photographer, Eliza often views the world from a small lens but there are always times when she prefers to set the camera aside and immerse herself. These moments are distilled into the three landscape paintings; each portrays a physical place but with a web of connections and divisions left as negative space. Connecting to space and finding a balance of our sense of self and our sense of being part of a larger web. The central piece to this series is the self portrait in which Eliza sought acknowledgment of the soul of place in those moments and inner reflection on her role as an occupant of such spaces.